PowerPoint – What’s new?

Like any presentation tool, it is meant to enhance what the presenter is saying, it is not a tool to do the job for the presenter.

Remember: –“Your Slides should be a billboard not a document”

A PowerPoint presentation needs to work with the creative constraints of short attention spans, just like the billboards designed to catch the eyes of moving motorists.

But PowerPoint creators have the luxury of multiple slides to make a point. And now some wonderful creative tools have become even better with the enhancements in Microsoft’s new PowerPoint 2016 – Here are just a few.

Save time with the new PowerPoint Designer- Any presentation starts with the hunt for a suitable template or theme, maybe you can create one from scratch but there again who of us are designers. Up to12,000 plus professionally designed creative options are now available.

Learn with “Tell Me”- New to PowerPoint is the “Tell Me” assistant to help you navigate through the many options. Just type what you want to do into the box provided and the programme points you precisely in the right direction.

Power Search with Bing “Insights” – Looking for more information or creative inspiration? Highlight a keyword and right-click to use the Bing-powered Smart Lookup to bring in search results from the web and Wikipedia.

Smoothly Animate with Morph Transitions – Morph Transitions is designed to make animations easier – the direct transitions of Morph is a powerful tool to explain business processes or steps.

Other features such as “Ink Your Equations”- “Six New Chart Types” – “Pre-set Shapes” – “Screen Recording” and “Sway” are all there to help you dispel the “Death by PowerPoint” tag bestowed upon by past PowerPoint audiences sitting through boring presentations created (wrong word) assembled by non-creative presenters.

To sum up PowerPoint was designed to create linear presentations i.e. start with your first slide and progress through to the last slide, and while you can jazz up your presentation with different effects and transitions it is still essentially a slideshow that has been known to take a lot of time to assemble.

But now with PowerPoint 2016 you can create more free-form presentations that should have a lot more flair thus enabling you to hold the attention of your audience in a much more creative way, you can also include content from social media – warning!! (if you download rubbish quality you will still get rubbish quality on the screen)

All this is likely to help you spend less time putting your presentation together thus giving you more time to plan what it is you want to communicate – not a bad idea – to all those presenters in the past who have bored audiences’ silly all over the world, please take note, there are now no excuses.